As an avid reader of all of Julia Armfield’s fiction, I was eager to pick up her newest novel. From the author of Our Wives Under the Sea (2022), Private Rites (Fourth Estate, 2024) promised to be poignant, haunting, and literary. Set in a future world where environmental disaster has flooded much of the world with ceaseless rains, threeRead More
A Lush Horror Novella Embracing Death and Renewal: Green Fuse Burning by Tiffany Morris Review
“Why did people need to be in nature to process the things that happened to them? Maybe it was because what was thought of as wild did not require a veil—it saw you as you truly were: an animal skulking among animals.” Though I haven’t read a lot of horror, there is plenty of horrorRead More
The Unique Venom of Found Family: Sister Snake by Amanda Lee Koe Review
Su and Emerald are sisters with nothing in common: Su lives in Singapore, playing the perfect wife to her conservative politician husband. Emerald is a queer sugar baby in New York, barely scraping by living with an artist friend. While their current lives look very different and they rarely speak, they have a shared past:Read More
Rachel reviews Small Angels by Lauren Owen
Amazon Affiliate Link | Bookshop.org Affiliate Link Dark, Gothic, and atmospheric, Lauren Owen’s new novel Small Angels (August 2022) is perfect for fans of spooky queer fiction and it’s out just in time for autumn! This book is definitely one to add to your Halloween TBR. Small Angels begins in a small English village with a story thatRead More
Carmella reviews All Men Want to Know by Nina Bouraoui
Content warning: this review references sexual assault In the first chapter of her auto-fictional novel All Men Want to Know, Nina Bouraoui (translated from French by Aneesa Abbas Higgins) writes: “I want to know who I am, what I am made of, what I can hope for; I trace the thread of my past backRead More
Carmella reviews Notes of a Crocodile by Qiu Miaojin
Trigger warning: this review discusses suicide. What do crocodiles and lesbians have in common? Plenty of things, as I learned from Qiu Miaojin’s Notes of a Crocodile. The novel, first published in Chinese in 1994, is a fragmented, broody, and often puzzling coming-of-age tale. The main story is told through journal entries by our narrator,Read More
Carmella reviews Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo
It felt like I was seeing the vibrant front cover of Girl, Woman, Other everywhere (or at least all over lesbian bookstagram), so when it won the Booker Prize for Fiction, I decided it was finally time to buy a copy and see what the buzz was about. The book follows twelve loosely-connected characters, eachRead More
Mars reviews Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel
It’s hard to boil this one down. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic is a complex portrait of a complex family. Let no one tell you that graphic novels cannot be intense reckonings of literature, especially not when they have become staples of the modern lesbian literary canon and have been reproduced as a very successful Tony-awardRead More